Ecclesiological Shift

A lot is going on in our world right now.

We are slowly emerging from the first significant pandemic in over a hundred years.

War has broken out in Eastern Europe, and there is a genuine threat of conflict spreading across the continent. For the first time since the Cuban missile crisis, the world faces the prospect of nuclear fallout.

Stock markets are reacting sharply to rapidly rising inflation rates worldwide, and some nations are experiencing economic chaos.

The ever-present threat of an anthropogenic climate catastrophe hangs over our heads. Many parts of the world are already dealing with rising sea levels, unseasonal and prolonged droughts, extreme flooding, and rising temperatures.

For decades, postmodern philosophies have permeated and dominated our educational and political institutions, leading to the rise of the autonomous self as the ultimate authority and a deep commitment to the priority of expressive individualism. This has, in turn, led to the psychologisation of identity and sexuality, producing new categories of self-definition and creating a complex set of challenges around recognition and inclusion.

Changing workplace culture (digital office and work-from-anywhere) and rapidly emerging technologies (mobile web technology and AI) are significantly changing the social and cultural landscape.

To top it all off, the Australian Census Results for 2021 have revealed a sharp decline in Christian allegiance in our country, consistent with a decrease in Christian adherents seen in many other parts of the Western world.

All these factors and more are changing how we think and feel about our lives today and how we frame our hopes for the future.

For the church, this is the unchartered territory in which it must maintain its mission and clarify its response.

The fact that the church is currently dealing with many internal scandals and conflicts doesn’t make the task any easier.

While these realities may appear quite confronting and possibly even overwhelming, the church has an opportunity to reframe its core identity, rethink its mission, and renew its commitment to its God-given cause.

There will undoubtedly be a plethora of opinions on how the church ought to respond, but I want to add my thoughts to the conversation in the hope that they might contribute meaningfully to clarifying how we can embrace this cultural moment and best serve God’s purpose in our generation.

In short, I believe three significant shifts are already taking place and must occur if the church effectively reaches the world with the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

A Shift in Ministry Philosophy: From Attractional to Missional.

I sense that a significant move is taking place away from attractional (seeker-sensitive) models of ministry to missional (empowered disciples/community engagement) models of ministry.

Many evangelical churches of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries were built on the seeker-sensitive paradigm championed by leaders like Bill Hybels (Willowcreek), Rick Warren (Saddleback), and Andy Stanley (Northpoint). Much of the language in the Identity Statements of these types of churches has been borrowed from these particular megachurches as pioneers of the movement.

The primary goal for these churches has been to create weekend service experiences that remove potentially offensive elements of the gospel and make church accessible and enjoyable to the un-churched (e.g. at Northpoint, their vision has been to be “a church that unchurched people love to attend”, and one of their key measurables was the extent to which unchurched people indicate they have enjoyed their experience of Northpoint).

There is clear evidence, however, that these attractional models of ministry are losing ground, and churches that are openly charismatic and experiential in their approach to faith life are gaining ground.

Churches like Northpoint have recognised this shift and recently modified their mission statement to reflect the change. Their new mission statement reads: “To inspire people to follow Jesus by engaging them in the life and mission of North Point Community Church”. This shift is also reflected in adding a new strategic priority to “endear our community by ensuring people know we’re here, are happy we’re here and are better off because we’re here”.

Now, while I believe that the seeker-sensitive movement has helped the church shift its focus from “insiders” to “outsiders,” I am convinced that the well-intentioned attempt to make the church more accessible to non-Christians has only made it more palatable to nominal Christians.

What we have been left with are large communities of nominal conservative evangelical consumers who see the church primarily as a distributor of spiritual goods and services designed to enhance individual faith lives. I suspect that this demographic is largely falling away as identifying with Christianity becomes more inconvenient.

In response, this shift in ministry philosophy will prioritise calling people to full devotion to following Jesus, i.e. an unapologetic articulation of the demands of discipleship and the expectations of following Jesus.

It will emphasise the “whole-of-life” and “all-of-self” nature of true discipleship and the need for intentional, relational and experiential models of discipleship.

It will champion community engagement beyond the weekend celebration, prioritising the call to live out love in personal and practical ways.

Most importantly, it will take seriously the implication of the question: “If the church closed its doors tomorrow, would anybody in the community know or care?”

The churches that thrive in this shift will be those that commit to being a vital and valuable (and therefore valued) presence in the world and recognise that evangelism is changing to “Go and Be” (missional) first and “Come and See” (invitational) second.

A Shift in Spirituality: From Theoretical to Experiential.

In the evangelical church, in particular, the emphasis has been on “right belief,” often to the exclusion of the importance of “right behaviour.”

We have defined discipleship as acquiring the correct beliefs about God (which vary from denomination to denomination), making most discipleship pathways and programs somewhat academic.

I sense a shift is needed from “discipleship as education” (accumulating knowledge) to “discipleship as relational experience.” That’s not to say that one is more important than the other or that they are mutually exclusive, only that the former has so dominated that we have lost sight of the need for the latter.

We are called to a life of faith, not merely adherence to beliefs. The essential difference is that faith (in a biblical sense) is active and requires trust and obedience. Belief, for the most part, can be quite passive and doesn’t require much more than mental assent.

We are called to follow Jesus, and that requires more than intellectual agreement with a set of propositional truths about God. It requires conducting ourselves in a way that reveals and honours the values and priorities of the Kingdom of God as taught and modelled by Jesus.

A Shift in Theology: From the “Soul” Gospel to the “Whole” Gospel.

Evangelicalism, in particular, has assumed a very narrow definition of the gospel (saving human souls for eternity). At the same time, the biblical vision of our eternal destiny is much broader and includes the redemption and restoration of all creation.

We have told people that the “good news” is simply that we can escape the possibility of eternal judgement on the other side of this life through personal faith in Jesus, i.e. by giving mental assent to theoretical ideas about who God is and what He has done in and through Jesus.

However, a theological shift is happening now that is refreshing our understanding of key Christian concepts like “the gospel,” “faith,” “salvation,” “evangelism,” and “sin.”

The inherited Dispensationalist theological perspectives of the previous era, which have bred a kind of spiritual indifference toward the planet and much of our present social and cultural context, are being discarded in favour of a more robust vision of the future that includes the redemption of all of creation rather than its abandonment.

For too long, we have assumed that the methods change, but the message doesn’t when precisely a change in the message is needed.

Our message has become distorted while we have spent most of our time and energy devising more relevant methods. But it’s not just our style that is not connecting with people—it’s our message.

Many people find the content of the current version of the gospel incoherent, illogical, unbelievable, and unappealing. That’s because, for the most part, it is.

Evangelicalism’s gospel has reduced sin to personal moral failure, salvation to individual absolution, hope to a one-way golden ticket to heaven and love to the mere tolerance of others. It isn’t compelling, believable, sensible, or even biblical.

Jesus preached the gospel of the coming of the Kingdom of God (Mark 1:14-15), i.e. the restoration of God’s rule and reign over all creation. Of course, that is good news for the sinner but also good news for the poor. It is good news for the lost but also good news for the marginalised. It is good news for all the world’s people but also good news for the planet.

It’s time for the church to recover the whole gospel for the whole world.